Seafloor Maps for Ocean Management

Coastal and fishery resource managers must frequently make decisions about development projects or uses of the coastal zone without sufficient knowledge of the marine habitat types that the proposed projects impact. Development projects, such as aquaculture, wind farms, pipeline and cable installations, construction of docks, piers, sewage outfalls, and discharge of pollutants (e.g. nutrients and heavy metals), can disrupt and degrade the habitat functions and values of the marine environment. Productive habitats for commercially and ecologically valuable species are located throughout the coastal zone and are potentially impacted by these activities.

Benthic habitat maps are a vital tool to allow managers to visualize the distribution, diversity and extent of marine communities under their jurisdiction. Recent advances in acoustic mapping systems, such as sidescan sonar and multibeam sonar, has made it possible to obtain high-resolution information about the seafloor, and has made benthic mapping feasible for large areas of the seafloor. Benthic habitat maps can be used to aid in siting and reviewing the environmental impacts of a wide variety of development projects on the seafloor. They can also be used as a planning tool to insure future protection efforts (fishery closures, MPA's, ocean use allocation) are habitat based and representative of all regional habitat types. A critical need for managers is to monitor the individual and cumulative impacts of human activity in the marine environment. This will be greatly facilitated when the spatial distribution of various benthic habitat types are known.